Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Huang, Jimmy
• Henfridsson, Ola
• Liu, Martin J.

Titel

Extending Digital Ventures Through Templating

Ist Teil von

• Information systems research, 2022-03, Vol.33 (1), p.285-310

Ort / Verlag

Linthicum: INFORMS

Erscheinungsjahr

2022

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

INFORMS Pubs Suite

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• A powerful way of growing digital ventures is templating. Templating involves the generation and use of generic solutions across business areas to reduce cost and increase speed. There are three main processes with which ventures can improve templating: concepting, generalizing, and porting. This paper describes these processes and proposes implications for managers engaged in growing their digital venture. Digital ventures typically face significant growth expectations. A common response is to extend the current operations into new areas through repurposing its digital core (e.g., search engine, data mining technique, platform, or voice interface). Grounded in prior literature, we surmise that the high versatility of the digital venture’s digital core facilitates such an extension by reducing cost and increasing speed. However, we know little about the process by which digital ventures draw on their digital core to extend current operations. To this end, we use Penrose’s work to analyze a two-year in-depth case study of a Chinese digital venture’s extension of its initial operations based on its credit rating technology. Our findings suggest that digital venture extension is facilitated by templating, which is a digitally enabled process of generating and using generic solutions across business areas. Through our grounded analysis, we unpack templating by tracing three processes contributing to digital venture extension: concepting, generalizing, and porting. Synthesizing our findings, we contribute to the emerging digital innovation and entrepreneurship literature by developing a process model of digital venture extension.